This new release by Naxos of Italian composer Franco Alfano's chamber music
follows last year's first volume, warmly received (review),
of his Cello Sonata and Piano Trio ('Concerto'), featuring, as here, Samuel
Magill, Elmira Darvarova and Scott Dunn, and recorded three years earlier.
A few months ago Naxos also released on Blu-ray a performance of Alfano's
opera Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Plácido Domingo in the title role
- see review
of the earlier NTSC version.

In his lifetime Alfano had reasonable success, at least until World War II.
Posthumously his musical reputation has survived chiefly in Italy, where he
sometimes appears in fifth place in that country's equivalent of Russia's
'Formidable Five', ranking with - though a little below - Respighi, Pizzetti,
Malipiero and Casella. Beyond his homeland his reputation was tarnished by
his association, more opportunistic than ideological, with Mussolini, and
by an apocryphal anecdote, recycled by Naxos's in-house reviewer, according
to which Arturo Toscanini "walked out of the orchestra pit on the opening
night of Puccini’s opera Turandot, just at that point where Franco
Alfano’s completion began". A more plausible version has Toscanini pausing
and announcing where Puccini's completed music ends. Grandiose maestro that
he was, Toscanini himself chopped and changed Alfano's completion, with the
latter being censured for the musical supererogations of the former. Concrete
facts about Alfano's life are in fact hard to come by, though Konrad Dryden's
recent biography, 'Franco Alfano: Transcending Turandot' (Scarecrow Press,
2009), fills in a few gaps. Happily, Dryden has written the notes for this
CD, giving him the chance to fill in the gaps he himself left in his book
through focusing almost entirely on Alfano's operas.

Alfano had a reputation for favouring high tessituras in his numerous operas.
The same may be said of the violin part of the Sonata, lending the
work not just a very distinctive sound, but also a feeling of luminosity and
emotional intensity bordering on sensuality. Not surprisingly, it is a demanding
work for the violinist, wonderfully handled by Darvarova - according to the
notes, "a concert violinist since the age of four" - and no easy
ride either for pianist Scott Dunn. Alfano revised the work in 1933, but this
is the original version from a decade earlier, written at about the same time
as, and on a par with, his excellent Cello Sonata.

Alfano was nearly seventy when he began writing what was to be his last chamber
piece, the Piano Quintet in A flat. Though a work of great maturity,
it is surprisingly reminiscent of the Sonata, at least in the violin writing,
which again has a high tessitura. In the previous decade Alfano had been through
a mainly neo-Classical phase, and in earlier times had even had avant-gardist
tendencies, but the beautifully scored, superbly lyrical Quintet represented,
in Dryden's words, "a vehement reaction against atonal and dodecaphonic
music". The jubilant moderato con grazia middle movement has moments
of folk, jazz and musical theatre, yet its startling heterogeneity coheres
expertly. Not to be overshadowed, the finale is pervaded with an exotic oriental
flavour. Overall, Alfano's Piano Quintet is an inspired work of considerable
originality, dulcet, optimistic, indelible. Well performed by the five experienced
soloists of the ad hoc quintet, even if the ensemble playing occasionally
alludes to an imperfect mutual familiarity.

The mellow, slightly Jewish-sounding Nenia and the cheery, sassy
Scherzino, transcriptions made in 1935 by Enrico Pierangeli,
make ideal encore pieces to bring the CD to a close. Sound quality is good
throughout.

The blurb for this disc overstates things considerably by asserting that Alfano's
chamber music "is receiving deserved recognition" - its ringing
absence from recital programmes across Europe testifies to that - but this
and its recent companion CD should at least get things moving in the right
direction for this underrated composer.